Google's nofollow, or other

Forum Moderators: phranque

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Google's nofollow, or other

GoNC

11:22 pm on Feb 20, 2014 (gmt 0)

I need to link to a new website, but I don't want Google to follow the link or recognize it in any way.

What's the best way to do this? I think that rel="nofollow" still allows Google to follow it, but just doesn't lend PR to the link, so it's not quite what I want.

And I'm not sure that this can be done with robots.txt. I know that I can prevent the entire page from being indexed, but I just want to prevent the link from being followed.

TIA!

(I wasn't sure if this belonged under "Google SEO News and Discussion", since the topics there seemed to relate to Google as a business. Sorry to the mods if you have to move it.)

phranque

12:31 am on Feb 21, 2014 (gmt 0)

You could link to a redirect script and block the redirect script from crawling with robots.txt

lucy24

8:31 am on Feb 21, 2014 (gmt 0)

Do you mean that you don't want google to know that the targeted page exists at all? You said "new website", but if it's in North America, google already knows about it.

GoNC

9:03 am on Feb 21, 2014 (gmt 0)

Well, yes and no.

Without going in to it too much, what I have is a long-time client (professional friend) that wants to link to a friend's website with a bad reputation, in spite of my advice. I suspect that a regular link is going to cause his site to lose PR, which will inevitably be blamed on me.

So, I'm trying to make the client happy, but without doing any long-term damage.

Using the redirect scrip that phranque mentioned will work; in fact, I've done that now. I wish it could be just a little more seamless, but it works so I won't complain :-)